Whether your career is months-long or decades-long, it's never too late to start thinking about ways to network and manage your scholarly identity and reputation. Think about what kind of online presence you want to create, what you want to do online, and who you would like to interact with. These things will help you get started, and the rest of the information on this page will help with resources to start your journey.
Sharing your research in other places, such as a researcher profile, personalized website, social media, or a preprint server, allows a wider audience to read your research. This could lead to future collaborators, more citations, improvements in scientific findings or writing, and generally more impact and reach for your scholarly or creative works.
Networking can happen in a variety of ways online. First, you'll want to check with colleagues or mentors in your field to see which platforms that others in your discipline are using so you can connect with the most people. Next, you'll want to spend time creating an account and building up your profile.
Looking for collaborators? Check out these databases that can help you find colleagues to collaborate with on future projects.
Dimensions. This is a database that allows researchers to track trends in grant funding and publication, filtering and sorting by subject area, funder, institution, and dollar amounts over time. Search by subject area or topic, abstract, author, institution, or keyword.
Inspec Analytics. This database allows researchers in the physics and engineering disciplines to search for and monitor research output at the institution, national, and global levels to compare research output and locate potential collaborators.
Pivot. Run by the Office of Sponsored Programs, this searchable database allows researchers to locate funding opportunities and potential collaborators based on their past research and experience. Users can set up automatic alerts to be alerted of potential future opportunities.
Quick Tips for Academic Networking
It's important to make sure that you're presenting the professional profile that you want to when interacting on networking sites. This can range anywhere from entirely professional and polished, to someone that shares a mix of professional and personal things on their profile. The ultimate mix of these is up to you as the user, and there is no right or wrong approach!
Here are some things to consider before joining a networking site:
Share your publications responsibly and safely
Sharing your research, creative works, and publications on networking sites is a major part of the appeal and purpose of these sites. However, it's very important to remember that some publications may be protected under publisher copyright - which means that you might not be able to upload the fulltext version of a publication, and should share a link to it instead.
Here's some things to think about before sharing your work:
Academia.edu is one of the most popular and commonly used networking sites for academics. It's primarily used by those in the social sciences and humanities fields, but can and is used by other disciplines.
Some features of Academia.edu include:
Bluesky is a newer social networking site that has a broad range of users, including many within academic circles. There is a broad range of disciplines represented on the site, so it is up to the user to find and create a community within.
Some features of Bluesky include:
LinkedIn is a popular networking site that is used in some academic networks, as well as largely in the private/corporate sector. Users from a wide variety of disciplines and specialties use this site to network and find colleagues.
Some features of LinkedIn include:
Mastodon is a newer networking platform that uses the Fediverse to build channels that users can join and interact with others on. Mastodon uses individual servers - so users find and select the server that most relates to them or their interests and interact with users primarily on that same server.
Some features of Mastodon include:
Reddit is a social platform that allows users from all over the world to make and share posts, comment, engage, and more. There are communities (called subreddits) that allow users to engage with specific audiences. Some academic specific subreddits include r/academia, r/professor, r/gradstudent, and many more.
Some features of Reddit include:
ResearchGate is another extremely popular academic networking site. While used by a wide variety of academics, it is primarily used by those in the sciences, mathematics, and computer science disciplines.
Some basic features of ResearchGate include:
Preprint Servers
Preprint servers are digital platforms that allow researchers to share their preliminary research for crowdsourced peer review, and one method of making published scholarship open access. There are a wide variety of servers available, and they are generally organized by subject area (such as Biology or Medicine). Before joining a preprint server and sharing your work, make sure that you are allowed to share your work under any existing copyright or publisher agreements.
Below are links to some of the more popular servers available.